Differentiate between front- and back-office IS.
Front-Office IS: An IS that supports business function that extend out to the organization’s customers.
Back-Office IS: An IS that supports internal business operations of an organization as well as reaches out to suppliers.
What is information systems architecture?
A unifying framework into which various stakeholders with different perspectives can organize and view the fundamental building blocks of IS.
List three goal-oriented perspectives of an IS.
1.To improve business knowledge. Knowledge is a product of information and data.
2.To improve business process and services.
3.To improve business communications and people collaboration
List three technology-oriented perspectives of an IS.
1.The Database Technologies that support business accumulation and use of business knowledge
2.The Software Technologies that automate and support business processes and services.
3.The Interface Technologies that support business communications and people collaboration.
Define data requirements.
A representation of users’ data in terms of entities, attributes, relations, and rules.
Differentiate between business functions and business processes.
Business Processes – Tasks that respond to business events (e.g., an order). Business processes are the work, procedures, and rules required to complete the business tasks, independent of any information technology used to automate or support them.
Business function – a group of related processes that support the business. Functions can be decomposed into other sub functions and eventually into processes that do specific tasks.
Give several examples of business functions.
Sales, services, manufacturing, shipping, receiving, accounting.
What are cross-functional systems?
A cross-functional information system – a system that supports relevant business processes from several business functions without regard to traditional organizational boundaries such as divisions, departments, centers, and offices.
Why are businesses interested in cross-functional systems?
Today, many of the single-function ISs are being redesigned as cross-functional ISs, that support several business functions. In other words, all business processes required to ensure a complete and satisfactory response to customer order, regardless of which departments are involved.



What are process requirements?
Are often documented in terms of activates, data flows, or workflows and frequently defined as terms of policies and procedures.
Differentiate between business policies and procedures.
Policy: A set of rules that govern a business process
Procedure: Step-by-step set of instructions and logic for accomplishing a business process.
What are software specifications?
The technical design of the business processes to be automated or supported by computer programs to be written by system builders.
What are App programs?
A language-based machine readable representation of what a software process is supposed to do or a software process is supposed to accomplish it’s task.
Define prototyping.
A technique for quickly building a functioning, but incomplete model of the information system using rapid application development tools.
Define two critical interfaces goals for an IS.
1.IS must provide effective and efficient communication interfaces to the system’s users which should promote teamwork and coordinating of activities.
2.IS must interface effectively and efficiently with other ISs – both within the business and increasingly with other businesses ISs.
What phenomena are driving the trend toward GUIs?
The comfortability of the GUI and widely spreaded use of GUI in common Apps like Windows and web browsers.
What is the role of the network technology in IS?
Today’s ISs are built on networks. IS knowledge, process, and communications building blocks are layered on the network technologies and so allows any one building block to be replaced with another while having little or no impact on the other blocks.